A dark tale of owls, roads, life, death … and luck

Anyone who doubts this doesn’t pay much attention to the carnage scattered on and along highways, and certainly hasn’t driven the stretch of Interstate 10 between Kerrville and Fort Stockton where on just about any day a traveler can count dozens of carcasses of white-tailed deer, raccoons, possums, porcupines, a coyote or two and a score or two of assorted birds ranging in size from vultures to vireos.

Owls can be particularly vulnerable to being victims of encounters with motor vehicles.

These nocturnal avian predators are drawn to roads. It’s a place offering them two things they look for in a hunting area: plenty of prey and an unobstructed zone of attack.

Owls – great horned, barred, screech and barn owls – will take a position on a tree limb, fence post or utility post overlooking the road right-of-way, wait and watch.

Those rights-of-way invariably hold decent vegetative cover which is used by all manner of owl fodder, from cotton rats to cottontails, snakes, frogs, lizards and other critters deemed edible by owls.

The hunting owl waits and watches and listens (the birds have amazing hearing; they can move their ears independently and use that ability along with their dished face that funnels sound to those ears to triangulate location of unseen but not unheard prey) until it has a lock on some unwary young rabbit nibbling on grass or spots (using its huge eyes evolved for seeing in low light) a mouse pinballing from grass clump to grass clump.

The rodent or rabbit seldom sees and almost never hears the end coming. The owl simply leans forward, drops, uses its wide, soft-feathered wings that make almost no sound even when the bird flaps them to approach, then plunges those long, razor-sharp talons into the victim, driving them deep with a grip so powerful that until you have felt it seems impossible for the bird.

That 10-yard or wider strip of pavement running through the hunting ground of a road-side perched owl is a major factor in the bird’s choice of ambush location. That open ground, with no cover and no place to hide is a perfect killing ground for the bird.

It’s a place where, on cool nights, snakes slither and settle to take advantage of the retained warmth, exposing them to hungry owls which fall on them with ease.

And if a rabbit or mouse decides the grass is greener on the other side of the road, the trip across the concrete No Man’s Land exposes it to the owl. It’s easy pickin’ for the bird.

It also can be a death trap for them.

A car comes barreling down a dark road toward where an owl is perched overlooking the right-of-way.

A cotton rat in a clump of grass near the edge of the road feels the vibration of the approaching vehicle, sees the light, hears the rumble. Twitchy to begin with, the rat doesn’t know what to do. It darts into the road, and the watching owl swoops to pursue it.

Sometimes the owl gets the meal.

Sometimes it doesn’t

And sometimes the bird’s stoop sends it on a collision course with a vehicle travelling 60 mph.